How I Reported and Produced This Audio Package: A Look at the Process Behind the Story
By Oosheen Yadav
I did not set out to make a podcast episode. I set out to listen.
That distinction matters more than it sounds.
Where It Started
The idea came from a conversation, not a press release or a news peg. I kept hearing the same thing from Muslim American students and community members around me: that something had shifted after October 7. Not just in the news. In daily life. In how they moved through the world.
I wanted to document that shift before it became a footnote.
Building the Source List
Before I recorded a single second of audio, I spent weeks on the phone. Not interviewing. Just talking. I reached out to community organizations, legal advocates, students, and academics. I wanted to understand the landscape of the story before I started shaping it.
CAIR-NY was an early and important contact. Laamya Agarwala, a supervising attorney there, helped me understand what the data was actually showing and why individual experiences were connecting to a broader pattern. That institutional layer is something every audio package needs. Without it, personal stories float without context.
Finding Neda Mozuayani and Zainab Mozawalla took longer. Neither came through a press office or a media list. They came through community trust, people who knew people who had been willing to share their experiences in smaller settings and might be open to doing so on record.
The Pre-Interview
This step is underrated and often skipped. I never go into a recorded interview cold.
With both women, I had long conversations before we ever sat down with a recorder. I explained the story, what I was trying to do, what I was not trying to do, and what they could expect. I asked them to walk me through their experiences informally first. That process does two things. It builds trust. It also tells you where the real tape is going to come from.
Neda’s description of returning to her vandalized car did not come from a formal question. It came from me asking her to just take me back to that day, step by step. The detail about the shoe prints and the key scratches came out in that conversation, not in the recorded sit-down.
That is the pre-interview at work.
The Recorded Interviews
I recorded all interviews on a portable recorder with a lapel mic where possible. Audio quality matters in a package. A great quote buried in bad sound is still bad radio.
I asked open questions and then stayed quiet. Silence is an interviewing tool. Most people fill silence. What they fill it with is usually the most honest thing they say in the whole interview.
I never interrupted a source mid-thought, even when I knew where they were going. You can always cut tape. You cannot un-interrupt someone.
With the Hofstra panel, I attended in person with a recorder running throughout. I was not just there to capture the official remarks. I was listening for the unscripted moments, the asides, the things people say when they are speaking from instinct rather than preparation. Dr. Azim’s line about the media legitimizing a racial frame came in one of those moments. It was not in her prepared remarks.
The Research Layer
Good audio journalism sounds effortless. It is not.
Behind every minute of tape is hours of reading. I worked through CPJ reports, RSF data, academic studies on media representation of Muslim and Arab communities, court records from cases like Yassin Aref’s, and congressional testimony. I emailed CPJ directly and received a response from Carlos Martínez de la Serna. That email exchange gave me a quote I could attribute with confidence, not just pull from a published statement.
The research does not always make it into the final script. But it shapes every question you ask and every editorial decision you make in the edit.
Writing the Script
Audio scripts are not articles with sound attached. They are a different form entirely.
I read every line out loud before it stayed in the script. If it did not sound like something a person would actually say, I rewrote it. Short sentences. Active voice. No jargon.
The structure moved from personal to systemic and back again. I wanted the listener to meet Neda and Zainab first, to be inside their specific experiences, before I introduced the data and the expert voices. Emotion first. Context second. That is how people actually process information.
I wrote around the tape, not over it. If a source said something clearly and powerfully, my job was to set it up and then get out of the way.
The Edit
I edited in Adobe Premiere Pro. The technical edit came first, cleaning up silence, removing false starts, balancing levels. Then came the harder part: the editorial edit.
Every cut is a decision. Every piece of tape you leave in is a choice about what the story is. I kept a moment where one source paused and collected herself mid-answer. My first instinct was to cut around it. I did not. That pause was part of her truth and cutting it would have made the audio cleaner and the story smaller.
Nat sound from the Hofstra panel stayed in under the narration. It placed the listener in a real room where a real conversation was happening. That matters.
What the Process Taught Me
Reporting this package reinforced something I already believed but needed to be reminded of: people will tell you extraordinary things if you give them enough time and enough reason to trust you.
The best moments in this audio did not come from clever questions. They came from patience. From showing up. From asking someone to take me back to a specific day and then listening without interrupting.
That is the whole process, really. Build the trust. Do the reading. Ask the specific question. Write for the ear. Let the tape breathe.
The rest is just craft. And craft takes practice.
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